Melodic inversion is a compositional technique in which a musical phrase is flipped vertically - upward motion becomes downward motion and vice versa. This technique is used to generate new music from existing material and combines economy with structural unity. It is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invers...sic%29#Melodies

I have long been interested in inverting the music from Doom to create something that was felt new but was nonetheless authentically Doom-ish. Unfortunately the MUS format does not store accurate tempo data, which necessitates manual manipulation of MIDI conversions before any editing can take place. 4mer the guy behind this site did this tedious work for eight tracks from Doom I and I have used Finale to invert them. The results vary in quality and generally sound like Doom through a funhouse mirror: minor keys turn major, chord and key changes become strange. I like E1M8 pretty well. Here they are:

Feel free to use these - no credit to me is necessary. If anyone has any interest in this at all I can invert other MIDI files with functional tempos, but I'm not willing to deal with correcting the output of MUS2MIDI files.

jute said:
Unfortunately the MUS format does not store accurate tempo data, which necessitates manual manipulation of MIDI conversions before any editing can take place.

Can you take a look at these MIDIs and tell me if they would need such painstaking work or not?

I believe that they are fine, except for a slightly slower tempo, as they have a chance of having been created from Bobby Prince's original MIDIs instead of the MUS lumps. But maybe they have been MUS2MIDIed too?

I actually wrote my own vertical MIDI flipper in Java a while ago... D_VICTOR sounded pretty good, actually. Doesn't handle E1M1 well at all, though; I had added in functionality to analyze the highest and lowest notes of a track and shift it up and down several octaves accordingly after flipping, but it doesn't handle tracks which spend a lot of time in one octave and briefly play a few notes in a very different octave, which E1M1 is guilty of. The OP's version is much, much better-sounding than what I wound up with.

I'd share it, but the file-sharing service I use doesn't have a good phone interface (figures). Maybe tomorrow.

It's command-line based - generally it's "java -jar MIDIFlipper.jar <input> [<output>] [-preserveOctaves]". I've put in two .bat files that will run on any single file you drag into it, however, in the interest of speeding things up. (Sorry for the lack of GUI; maybe someday...)

"-preserveOctaves" does its best to reposition the center of each track as close as possible to the original track's center, so bass lines remain bass lines, instead of getting all squeaky. It's not perfect, though, particularly if a single track goes both very high and very low, so some manual adjustment would likely be recommended.

If you omit an output file, it'll put it in the same folder as the input, with "(flipped)" appended before the ".mid" (or "(flipped, octaves kept)" if relevant).

Also note that this doesn't work on MUS files, just MIDI ones. If you try to flip something that doesn't have a proper MIDI header, it'll abort.

That took longer than expected.
It seems MIDI composers aren't too worried about note duration - which makes a monumental task out of quantizing them just so, and sliding tracks so the downbeat lines up. E1M1 sounded like ass marinade. Here are the rest:

Quite an interesting thread. I'd wonder what would happen were one of the original developers decided to flip Bobby's compositions at the last moment before Doom was releasd? :D Gave it a shot flipping some tracks of my own. D_RUNNIN is now vaguely familiar of the Mission Impossible theme, and D_VICTOR is literally a parody of itself.

heh. these are pretty cool, actually! the majority of the songs in the OP sounds very happy-go esque and pretty weird, but E1M2 and E1M3 sounds pretty awesome. E1M8 sounds like the opposite of Sign of Evil. :p

I never seem to 'get' music theory, but a "stay-in-scale flip" might be intersting, like if in c major, this sequence:
c,d,e,f,g
would become:
c,b,a,g,f
(with c as the pivot)
instead of a more chromatic flip, where all 12 notes are considered.

I remember doing similar for a melody I made long ago, except I played both the normal and inverted simultaneously.

edit: oh yeah, I think most have played it already, doom2 map1 upside down... d runnin inverted would be fitting. Gives a weird sense of vertigo:http://filesmelt.com/dl/upsidedown222.wad
(oh yeah good point, needs complevel 9 because there's fake floors to simulate falling and stuff or something, I forget).

a simple program that inverts maps vertically would often make unplayable maps (because there's often ceiling height differences that are too big to walk over) and lifts and stuff break. but it would still be interesting and way easier than doing it by hand.

Gez said:
I believe that they are fine, except for a slightly slower tempo, as they have a chance of having been created from Bobby Prince's original MIDIs instead of the MUS lumps.

No fraggin' way. They might've not been converted with mus2midi, but they were converted with SOMETHING -- they're all type 0 one-track MIDI sequences with 1/89 timebases and approx. 86 BPM tempos.

As for MIDI sequences that DO come directly from the ones converted for the game -- try tracking down the "doom95.mid" files used in Doom 95 installers. I've found Doom's "Sinister" (D_E2M6) and "Victory" (D_VICTOR) and Doom II's "The Demon's Dead" (D_DEAD) in various versions.